Watch Obama Speaks at Harvard Law in ’90 on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
– T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Three weeks before Andrew Breitbart’s sudden and unexpected death, he made what would be his final appearance on the national stage at CPAC, the annual convention of the right-wing fringe, in Washington. He’d apparently gone to CPAC to announce that his online propaganda outlet had finally done what the liberal media had failed to do — they had vetted Pres. Obama.
“I’ve got videos, by the way,” Breitbart told the CPAC crowd. “This election we are going to vet him. I have videos. I’ve got videos. This election, we are going to vet him from his college days to show you — why — to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out. The narrative is going to come out.”
But Breitbart managed to step on his own headline coming out of CPAC. His threat to bring down the president was completely over-shadowed by the release of a video showing him in a drunken rage, shouting made-up nonsense at Occupy protesters outside the CPAC venue.
Back home in Los Angeles a few weeks later, on Feb. 29, Leap Day evening, as it happened, Breitbart stopped in at the Brentwood Bar off Sunset Boulevard, where he engaged in a political debate with a stranger at the bar while he downed a few glasses of wine. An hour or so later, he was walking near his home when a neighbor saw him collapse on the sidewalk and called 911. The ambulance took him to UCLA Medical Center nearby, where he died shortly after midnight.
He reportedly had been diagnosed with heart disease, and the Los Angeles County Coroner listed the cause of death as “natural causes.” But those inconvenient facts did not deter the right’s paranoid fringe from spreading the rumor that Breitbart had been murdered — presumably by members of Obama’s secret army of assassins, in an attempt to stop his vetting of the president cold in its tracks.
If so, Breitbart was murdered for nothing — in more ways than one.
Yesterday, Buzzfeed.com revealed that one of Breitbart’s purportedly damning videos planned to reveal had been available online at PBS.org for four years. Taken in 1990, when Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, the footage shows the future president speaking at rally calling for more diversity on the Harvard faculty. The pro-diversity campaign was led by Harvard Professor Derrick Bell, a famed civil rights advocate and attorney. Although the right is now trying to cast Bell as the “Jeremiah Wright of academia” — after Rev. Wright, the U.S. Marine veteran who led the church in Chicago attended by the Obamas and Oprah Winfrey and who was caught on tape suggesting that God would damn America for invading Iraq.
The footage was so non-controversial that Team Breitbart claimed at first, and apparently without irony, that Buzzfeed had selectively edited the video to excise the truly scandalous bits — selective editing being Breitbart’s signature tactic. PBS then released the entire video, which was apparently showed the same sequence of events as Buzzfeed’s version, except for a second or two in which Obama is seen hugging Prof. Bell on the stage.
What has been less widely reported is that this giant thud was compounded by the fact that the Harvard video was actually the second supposedly damning revelation about the president released by the Breitbart propaganda machine. The first item, which was released a few days ago, was an even bigger fiasco.
Get this. In 1998, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, attended a play about about Chicago activist Saul Alinsky. And then, making matters much, much worse — after the play, he sat on discussion panel with other Chicago dignitaries, including the author Studs Terkel.
Over the past few months, the right — and Newt Gingrich in particular — has been desperately attempting to rewrite the biography of Alinsky, whose book “Rules for Radicals,” has been twisted into an instruction manual for social and political agitation by right wingers lately, especially by the astroturfers behind the tea party mobs in 2009 but also by radicals like, well, Andrew Breitbart.
Nonetheless, Republicans have been busily converting Alinsky from an anti-poverty, pro-capitalist organizer into a communist — perhaps because they figure his name sounds vaguely communist-ic to their low-info, rural base. In fact, Alinsky was such a dedicated capitalist that he charged the anti-poverty and civil rights groups — and even the Black Panthers — he worked for in the 1960s for his services as an organizer.
So Breitbart’s first two “bombshells” — the news that Obama attended a play in 1998 and that he spoke at a pro-diversity rally in 1990 — have proved to be duds. But keep in mind that at CPAC, he said he had “videos,” plural.
It’s possible he was exaggerating about that, too, but it will be interesting to see what else, if anything, the Breitbarters have up their sleeves.
If the tape was so innocuous why would Ogletree suppress it?
Saul Alinsky quoted Satan as an inspiration.
Professor Bell wrote the Critical Race Theory, which comes and inch away from saying whites should be eliminated.
Death by a thousand cuts to the Democrat Media Machine.
I am Andrew Breitbart, let the war begin.
If the tape was so innocuous why would Ogletree suppress it?
– The video has been available on the PBS site and Youtube for four years.
Saul Alinsky quoted Satan as an inspiration.
– That is a lie. He didn’t “quote Lucifer.” Here’s what he actually said:
Professor Bell wrote the Critical Race Theory, which comes and inch away from saying whites should be eliminated.
– That’s not just another lie, it’s a stupid lie. For one thing, Critical Race Theory is a discrete area of study into how issues related to race play out in the law, education and other academic fields. It has nothing to do with the elimination the white race. That really shows your ignorance. And even if Bell had called for killing all the whiteys, which he didn’t, that doesn’t mean his students agreed with him.
I am Andrew Breitbart, let the war begin.
So I can only imagine that you feel that Baracka’s ties to Wright and Black Liberation Theology after sitting in his pews for 20 years is just another innocuous association.
Or that Obama and Ayers serving on many committes and boards in Chicago was just some “guy in the neighborhood”.
I can only hope after following Breitbart for years that he will allow liberals and the Democrat Media Machine to defend Obama by saying he was just a student taking a course from a radical professor. More will be revealed.
I think of it as death by a thousand cuts. Every little prick with eventually cause the left and Obama to hemorrhage.
Breitbart was a genius at releasing tapes to get the LSMs panties in a wad and then releasing more to prove them wrong after they have rushed around to defend themselves.
Breitbart’s mission was not so much to take down Obama, which will be a pleasant consequence, but to take down the lies and subterfuge of the Democrat Media Complex.
This mission will go far beyond the 2012 election by citizen journalists.
No, what I personally believe is that Barack Obama is too smart to buy into any religious bull shit, but that, like a lot of politicians, he goes to church because it would freak out the half-wits if he didn’t.
You may not like what Wright said, but some of it certainly had the ring of truth:
It means nothing to me, personally, but in the harshest part of Wright’s quote, which was taken out of context, he was referencing the Christian Bible:
I have no doubt that there will be more bilge coming from Breitbart, but I also have no doubt it will all be what it all always has been: Lies, half truths and Republican propaganda.
Have you seen the 1990 interview on C-Span with Thomas Sowell about Prf Bell. Stunning. Just a sweet black professor fighting for racial equality. Sarc
Nobody outside the ivory towers of legal academia cares what Derrick Bell thought or believed, and Thomas Sowell is a joke. But it is interesting that Sowell, a right wing propagandist, is trotted out as some sort of expert on Bell. Does Sowell have some special insight into Bell because Sowell is black too? Really?
That is exactly the sort of shallow and bigoted thinking that earned Breitbart the label “racist provocateur.” He was consumed by racism. It drove him from one self-inflicted, humiliating scandal to another until finally he became a national laughingstock, last seen drunk out of his mind, spewing spittle and ranting incoherently. That is how Andrew Breitbart will be remembered, if he is remembered at all.
And now, after his death, his minions are finishing the job, shredding the last flimsy tatters of what little respectability he had left with this blatantly racist nonsense.
It won’t work. Despite the best efforts of Andrew Breitbart — along with his mini-me, the convicted federal felon and accused attempted rapist James O’Keefe — in concert with the neo-Confederate tea baggers who run the Republican Party, this country will not go back to the days of Jim Crow.
It continues to amaze me that progressives/liberals continue to use the race card. Race has nothing to do with how I believe about Obama or the media, since I am black woman (grandmother) and was raised in the South as a child. I will admit I saw some pretty ugly and evil stuff, but in my experience those days are gone.
I disagree with Obama because of his ideology.
I just wonder Jon since you seem to think so many others feel as you do, that after several days some old black grandmother is the only person who has responded to your blog.
I was raised in the Jim Crow South too. Things are better than they were then — thanks, in large part to the liberals who pushed for equal rights — but racism is not only alive and well, it’s the driving force behind the Republican Party. The neo-Confederates have taken over.
You played the race card in your first comment — “Professor Bell wrote the Critical Race Theory, which comes and inch away from saying whites should be eliminated.” You say you only hate Obama because of his ideology, so — as your leaders say when asked about the president’s religion — we’ll have to take you at your word. But what you’ve posted here is identical to the racist talking points about Bell and the Harvard video I’ve seen elsewhere.